Unlocking the Resourceful Technician Formula

Anthony Perl: What I think we should do now is really unpack the resourceful technician formula. You've spoken about it in a previous episode. I think this is something that's going to add a huge amount of value to people listening in. So I guess, first of all, describe the formula to me. Tell me what, what actually is it?

Andrew Uglow: The resourceful technician formula is the result of the research that we did that unpacked how the automotive gurus of the industry were operating. In a way, in a highly complex, high information, high stress environment and being successful.

They had a strategy that was beyond simply memorizing volumes of information. And so what we found was there was three big chunks. That they had mastered, that allowed them to be resourceful in a way that gave them success beyond what Joe Average could achieve. Those three big chunks were mindset, meaning, and method.

And just going back quickly to the Viper, story where we said that a really small distinction can have a massive impact. Please don't make the mistake of thinking that mindset is just the, you know, think positively and be happy. And, and, and, and, and don't think that meaning is about, you know, looking up dictionary definitions and, understanding, uh, circuit design.

You know, it's, it's. Bigger than that. And, and certainly method is, um, we'll talk about some of the distinctions around method in a minute, but it's not just simply doing the right things in the right order. , it's beyond that.

So if we go and have a look at mindset specifically, there are competencies that these technical gurus were performing that gave them the ability. To have the quality of mindset that they had. So everyone essentially in the world runs a mindset, right? We all have our reference structures, our beliefs, our values, our all those sorts of things.

The quality of the mindset that these gurus , were, Operating with was nothing that we'd, I'd seen before when we went looking for, what makes good technicians, good technicians and how to good technicians get unstuck when they get stuck because everyone gets stuck. We weren't expecting to see, we were expecting to see attitude.

We weren't expecting to see this. So, um, the competencies that these people, these gurus were, were doing was, um, We call or I've, I've labeled the five factors of mental friction and there's five key areas that, will either cause more friction mentally for me or less friction mentally for me. , and the best way I think to understand mindset would be to compare mindset to engine oil.

So if you don't put. engine oil in the engine, and you run the engine, it's going to destroy itself in a very short period of time. If you don't put enough engine oil in, it'll run, but it won't run well, and eventually it'll break down and fail. If you put the wrong type of oil, It should have this particular grade and this particular quality and you use one that isn't that, it'll work for a bit, but it'll eventually break down.

And just as importantly, if you don't change the oil and keep the oil fresh, also cause excessive wear and it will break down. And so, If you managed those five factors, you had way less mental friction, just like if you put the right oil in the engine, you have way less friction and it performs better. The second part that we found that they were doing was they had a PMP. Okay. Um, and I think it was Akkadaka that sang about this.

You know, they send that song PMP, it's dynamite. Um, no, I won't sing for you. But a PMP stands for a Personal Meaningful Purpose. So often in how the technicians, these gurus were operating, they would come back to their personal meaningful purpose and they would say things to themselves like, if I really am a diagnostic guru, if I really am a diagnostic professional, I should be able to fix this.

And that was pivotal in them getting unstuck and they, they, they had this personal meaningful purpose that allowed them to go beyond what. normal technicians would do,

and it was critical in, in them getting unstuck, you know, they would, they would ruminate, they would leave sleepover problems, uh, because of their purpose, because that's what they were called to do, right? This is, this is my calling. This is my job in the world. This is where I fit. This is where I belong.

This is my purpose in, in showing my happy smiley face at work is to, um, I can't say the word that they use. Um, and if the, and if the, the problems on, on people's cars, uh, that, that's why they, that was what got them up in the morning. The last part that they had was a, um, and a good way to think of this is maintenance, was they had a strategy for maintaining this mindset.

It would be like doing an oil and filter change on a car, right? So over time using it, the oil gets dirty. It's in a really difficult environment, high pressure, high temperature, combustion, all the gases, all of the oils, all of the dirt and dust in the atmosphere. It's a nasty environment for an engine to run in.

And so, um, if you don't service the car. It's a matter of when, not a matter of if it absolutely will fail if you don't service it. And it was the same with their mindset. They had a mechanism for doing mental maintenance.

And maintaining the quality of their mindset, um, because we, we, we see this, uh, we see people burn out, we see all that sort of stuff. They had a strategy for being able to do that. So those three parts, those three competencies, managing the five factors of mental friction, uh, having a personal meaningful purpose and having a, um, um, a mental maintenance program for one of the better description where how they were able to continue to perform at this elite level.

The other part was meaning and you're all going, well, what's meaning? And it was the ability to accurately make meaning from all of the various data sources that were available to them. And if we just zoom out just a minute and think about the definition of resourcefulness that I described earlier, the first part was getting an accurate perception of what's going on.

What's really going on? I know what it looks like on the surface, but what's really going on? This is their ability to make meaning from data was amazing. And a good way to describe this would be like car whispering. They could walk up to a car, they could look at the data and they could go, I think it's this type of problem and I need to test here.

I could have someone else come up to exactly that same car, same problem, and they would go, um, I don't know, check sheet says to do this. And they couldn't make meaning even though they had the same data in front of them. They couldn't get to that point of accurate perception of what, this is what's really happening.

And they, they did this. They made meaning largely through the use of heuristics. Now, if you're not familiar with the term heuristics, and I wasn't, um, heuristics are, are quick, effective rules of thumbs. They're like tests, rule of thumb tests. You know, is this, is this black or is this a really dark blue?

Well, I know by doing this test, is this a fuel system issue or is this an electrical system issue? Well, I can know by doing this test. And so they have, and we'll unpack this in a bit more detail in, in future episodes, they have a, what's the word I'm looking for?

They have a very significant repertoire of heuristics that they have developed over the years. It comes about from, uh, partly from technical training, partly from experience slash insight, but it also comes about from

that resourcefulness piece, that ability to perceive and make distinctions around the meaning. So they can look at data and they can go, Oh, it's 12 volts. I should have 12. 1 or I should have 11. 95 12 is bad. And like we're talking super, super fine distinctions. Now, if you're not into technical diagnosis, you, you don't understand what I just said.

You just go up 12. What's the difference between 95. It is all the difference in the world. It's the difference between shorting the red and blue wires and not shorting the red and blue wires. It is. It is a massive thing. And so they were able to make meaning quite effectively. Um, and, and they used all sorts of heuristics.

And so, uh, we talk about having a rapid, the rapid accuracy model, being able to test data's validity very, very quickly. Uh, we talk about effective data navigation being that there is volumes of data, like libraries of data, of information available on scan tools. Now, like just recently we were, I was doing some training on a new vehicle, new Alfa Romeo, and just in one module alone, there was over a thousand lines of code.

Sorry, a thousand lines of data. And it's like, and that's one module. And there's like 30 something modules on the car. You know, how do I know what data I should be looking at? They have strategies for figuring that out. Um, they have strategies for starting. They have strategies for dull, boring routines that they have to do.

They have, um, uh, I call it divide and conquer. They have waves splitting the system and then running a test to see if they've split it correctly. So the, the, the, these strategies, these tactics that they're operating for making meaning were at a level beyond anything else. And here's the magic, right? If I've got someone who is an okay tech, they've got a good sound understanding of the Automotive technology in cars today don't have to be awesome, but they've got a good sound base to work from.

I can teach you these strategies and most of the strategies you can pull out and use on the very next car that you're facing.

Anthony Perl: So the key is, is how do you know it works? I mean, have you done this

Andrew Uglow: Yeah, we have. We have. Um, I'll come to that in just a second. Um, the third part we said was method

everyone follows a method, right? Some people, the method is, uh, throwing darts at a board and hoping for the best. All right. That's a method. Um, the way that these diagnostic gurus ran their method was it was dynamic. It wasn't a checklist where I started A and I finished at Z and I go through all the letters, although they will describe it to you as if they did that, but that's not what they did.

They had the ability to look at the big picture and they would do, well, I'm going to start with K this time. And then I'm going to move to M and then I'm going to have a look at P and then I'm going to go back to, to, uh, to, to B because I think B is the next best test. And then I'm going to come back and I'm going to do K again because, you know, the stuff has changed.

I've learned new things and I need to know what K is. But when you ask them what they did, they said, I did A, B, C, D, E, F, G. But they didn't. They didn't do that. They did this, and it was based upon the problem. Was it a diesel fuel system problem? Different pattern. Was it a, um, a four wheel drive system that was at fault?

Different pattern. Was it a, an immobilizer no start versus a run out of fuel no start? Totally different pattern each time. But they would describe it as ABCDEFG. And so they had this dynamic method, this dynamic process that they were doing that was completely different from everyone else. And it was based on heuristics.

So when I say that they were resourceful, they had a vast raft of options available to them. And they would look for matches or mismatches with the symptoms. And so they go, I've got this symptom, this symptom, this symptom. Well, that looks a little bit like this. And so that's where they would start. Um, and the way they developed this was they developed it over decades.

And it was like having an operating system.

I guess a meta search engine might be a better way of describing it. Wouldn't it? That they had a search engine that could search other search engines.

Anthony Perl: it's, and you know, unpacking that whole idea of how people think differently, but then how you actually pick that up and implement and measure the success of being able to do that by teaching it.

Andrew Uglow: Yeah. So

so my first opportunity in, in teaching this, I had a client in New Zealand and I had some challenges with a particular type of vehicle. , it was a commercial vehicle. , And it was taking a month to fix the vehicle. So the car would come in and a month later. Now, these are commercial vehicles. There are businesses on the end of these vehicles.

Uh, and so that caused a lot of problems. There are all sorts of phone calls happening. Where's my van? How much longer? Why isn't it done yet? I'm going to sue you. I'm losing all this money. So there was some pretty unpleasant conversations happening. There was a lot of traffic and communication between the, um, the importer who I was doing the work for and the dealerships.

Um, have you done this from the manufacturer to the dealership? Have you done this dealership? Yeah, I've done it. Well, have you done this? Yeah, I've done it. What about this? What's your number? Oh, the number is this and backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. And, and, and on average, there was something like 12 different messages, at least.

In the system per vehicle. And so there's all of the time to create the message, read the message, wait for a response, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Parts being put on, the average number of repair attempts was nearly three. So the car would come in, we'd do something, it'd go back out again, wasn't fixed, come back in, do something, go back out again, wasn't fixed, come back in, pretty much change everything on the car related to that system.

Oh, and now it's working, and it goes out. And who's paying for that? So they had, they, they had a real problem. They said, Andrew, we want you to come and do some training on, on, on this particular system. Now, at the time I had got about 80 percent of what I know now we'd been working with this, working with technicians here in Australia, working with technicians overseas, um, doing behavioral modeling projects with them, understanding how they, how they work, collating the data, understanding seeing this, this pattern, this map develop, and so.

When I did the training, I didn't just do technical training. I didn't do the knowledge and skill. I did knowledge and skill, but I also used the vertical axis for the first time because I knew it was a thing. And I don't know if I'm going to get myself in trouble or not. There is a, there is a dirty, sturdy, unspoken thing in, in, in training that the part about training is that it, it leaks. And so you can come along to training and 12 months later, you need more training because what you did, either the technology has trained, has changed, or you've forgotten it.

And so you need to be retrained. And so it's like the perpetual job, right? I'll never be out of work. And you can track the effectiveness of the training. And we know depends upon what it is, but typically three to six months, it starts to drop. We see a drop in effectiveness of the people in the workshop.

So we see more rework, we see longer times, we see more attempts to fix. After I did this training where I taught resourcefulness in with knowledge and skill in with ability, we tracked with the, the, the importer, the effectiveness of the people in the dealership. And it didn't change. It went to one repair attempt.

It went from like over a month to down to two weeks, which most of that time was waiting for the parts to turn up. And like, The number of customer agro phone calls, just almost zero, like there was one or two, you know, the number of, uh, of communication between the dealership and the, and the manufacturer, do this, done it, do this, done it, do this, done it.

It was like three instead of like 12 or something. So the time that we saved the importer, the time that we saved the dealership, the time that we, we saved the customer, if you had to add that up, it's millions of dollars, being that there was, I think, 12 or 14 different sites that were having problems with this particular vehicle.

And the only thing I did different was that I taught resourcefulness. And you go, well, how do you know that, Andrew? Because 12 months earlier, I'd done training on exactly this problem. But the second time I did it, we did it, the technical skill, skill and ability and the resourcefulness. And that was the difference.

And we tracked it all the way through to when COVID hit. And then of course, after that, we were like, there was no point, everything closed and it all went to, to, well, it all went down the tube at speed, uh, because there was the, the, the data wasn't valid. It was an entirely different world. But up until that point, we hit all of the metrics and we just stay there for six months straight.

So does it work? Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Perl: Amazing. I love it. Um, before we finish up on this episode, we promised something in the last episode, because we started the Viper story in the last episode. And I want to know what happened. How resourceful, how resourceful were you in resolving this, in this problem with a part that, um, was no longer available on a 150, 000 vehicle?

Andrew Uglow: Yeah. So that's, um, I'm there's a, there's a, there's a strategy or a skill called called manage. Uh, let me say that again. So there's a strategy and a skill called managing up and it's like managing your manager, right? Rather than going to your manager and going, Hey, I screwed up and getting a don't come Monday because you screwed up, you're better off solving the problem.

And then going to your manager and going, Hey, I screwed up, but I solved the problem. Right. That's, that's a, that's a far nicer conversation. Um, so I, the first thing I did was I asked anyone in the class, I said, does anyone else, anyone here know, I explained the situation there's none in Australia and there's none in the world and they don't make them anymore.

Um, and so how do we get one? First question was, can we use a secondhand one now to try and find a secondhand one in the U S is going to be problematic, right? Being that if, if we can find one, we've got to get it shipped, which is going to take ages. And everyone said, no, we don't know anyone. So I have a couple of people that I used to work, work with who are, um, were my mentors and quite, quite gifted mechanically.

And I, I got ahold of them and I said, Hey, can you help me? Do you know anyone who does repairs on this sort of stuff? And he said, yes, actually I do. There's a guy. Uh, he going, here's his number, go and talk to him. So I ring this guy and I go, Hey, look, I've got this problem. This has happened. The smoke's come out and he, he goes, Oh, what, what brand of module is that?

And I said, Oh, it's a, it's a, it's a Nippon Dentsu. That's the brand of module. And he goes, Oh, Nippon Dentsu. We fix them all the time. Bring it round. Cost me 350 bucks to fix, to fix this, the new part, the new part was like 2, 000. So it cost me 350 to fix a 2, 000 part. I put it in, works perfectly. Absolutely, and still did.

Like, I just saw the car as she's laid up, still working. Um, I go to my boss and go, Oh, look, you know, you know, we let the smoke out of the module, but I had a guy fix it and it's all done. And he goes, yeah, well, okay, we'll just be a bit more careful next time. You know, so I kept my, I kept my job dodged a bullet and we actually got to sell the car and it worked for the customer.

So, so, um, yeah, that was, um, it's sometimes not just what you know, it's who you know, isn't it?

Anthony Perl: Absolutely. Well, it's good to see resourcefulness put to the test and, uh, a solution found.